Naskh Script, Iranian's Great Contribution to the Propagation of Islam

After the revelation of the Holy Quran to Prophet Mohammad (pbuh), Muslims set to work to write the Holy Verses, but due to the peculiarity of Kufi script and unskillful writing of some of the Prophet’s Companions, neither the recent Iranian and Egyptian converts nor some of the Arabs themselves could easily read the Book. Thus some efforts were done to improve the existing Kufi script. Abolasvad Dowli was a pioneer of making the improvement by applying diacritical marks to Arabic letters. Also under Abdolmalik-ibn-Marvan, they devised some measures such as dotting some letters like ث, ت, ب. None of these, however, could answer to the above-mentioned difficulties till an Iranian artist named Ibn-Moqlah removed the problems by inventing a new script called the new Naskh. This script abrogated other forms of writing and has been used till now as the most conventional script for writing the Holy Quran. This article tries to bring into focus the Muslim Iranians’ contribution to the propagation of Islam by introducing two prominent ones: Ibn-Moqlah, and Ibn Bavad.